D i g i t a l R e c o r d i n g
On The IBM Compatibles
Have you ever wondered why the Apple MAC and Amiga Can play
back hi quality sound and generate music that sounds like a $50,000
synthesizer and you IBM PC/clone Only plays Beeps and tones?
The only reason IBM put a speaker on there pc was because it was
cheeper than using a buzzer. The output is only one bit and Looks more
like they just stuck a speaker on a left over signal line from the keyboard
controller.
This is not well suited to play back digital recording or music other than
beeps and tones. The task to generating sound on internal speaker is a lot
like trying to turn on and off a light switch fast enough to play music.
_____ _ ..________ _______ __
| . .| | . .. .. | | .. | | |
|. . |. .. . | |. . . | | |
. . |. .| . .| |..| 0 Line
--.-----.---------.------------.------.|-------.------------.--.----------------
. |. .| |. . . | |. . .| |. . .
.| | . . .| | .. . | | .. . . | | .. . .
._| |____.__._| |_______| |_____.___.__| |_____..._
. ...
Think of the " . " as the original sound wave.
The best the Internal speaker can generate is shown by the " __ " and " | " .
As you can see a lot of the Information in the sound wave was lost when
you force the different levels in the wave to only two levels (this is
called a square wave).
This loss in information is heard in the form of noise.
MOZART.COM and any other Programs that play Sound from the IBM's internal
speaker use this method. The best attainable sound quality is
6 DB S/N ratio. (provided the source was not a square wave to begin with.)
The three computers I mentioned above have a built in d/a converter
(Digital to analog). This allows them to generate all the different
levels in the sound wave.
The Number of levels that can be reproduces is measured in bits.
1 bit 2 Levels 6 Db S/N ratio
4 bits 16 Levels 24 Db S/N ratio
8 bits 256 Levels 48 Db S/N ratio { MAC AMEGA }{ VGA cards for video }
10 bits 1024 Levels 60 Db S/N ratio
12 bits 4096 Levels 72 Db S/N ratio { ISDN PHONE LINES COMPRESSED TO 8BITS }
14 bits 16 K Levels 84 Db S/N ratio
16 bits 64 K Levels 96 Db S/N ratio { Compact Disk player }
There are several company's that sell Digital recording and playback
boards. They range for $395.00 to $8K . Most are 8 Bit some of the more
expensive ones are 12 & 16 Bit.
The voice mail systems are from $4000. to $20K and up. they are all 8 bit
with some kind of compression to save space.
I have designed an built an 8 bit digital recorder and player that
Operates through the Printer Port. It is Inexpensive to built .
I used to to record MOZART.COM with but to make it into a demo form
that can play on a standard MSDOS machine with out the special playback
hardware it is only a one bit recording.
I have software to convert MAC soundfiles and Tandy 1000 soundfiles
into a format that can then be played back through an
IBM PC with NO ADDITIONAL HARDWARE.
I also have software to play back MAC and tandy 1000 sound files in there
original hi sound quality ( !Sounds great! ).
I an currently making a better recording utility and play to make a
sound editor ,synthesizer and conversion program.
If anyone is interested in digital recording or buying
Some of this software/hardware or just want to see a demo
feel free to call me at (415) xxx-xxxx.
I currently don't have any plans to market this but I would like to.
There is no reason why IBM users have to put up with bad sound any more.
John L. Sokol
6/89
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 06, 2026
D i g i t a l R e c o r d i n g On The IBM Compatibles
Sunday, November 09, 2025
player for an animation I did on the TRS80 CoCo in 1980
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/1b22e03a-a33a-4bc9-95c3-e5b439faa0f6
Used Claude.ai to make a web player for an animation I did on the TRS80 CoCo in 1980 by recording the lat and lon of each point along the coast lines, then rendering it on a global by warping it using sine and cosine. later I reused it in Turbo Pascal to be able to demonstrate and animation while playing digital audio in the background.
https://github.com/johnsokol/AudioByte/tree/master/SND/BKPLAY
Tuesday, September 05, 2023
End of And Era
The end of the electronic shops in Silicon Valley.
All now Long dead.
The end of Frys.
almost unimaginable, this place was Amazing
almost unimaginable, this place was Amazing
Statue of Nikola Tesla at the Freemont Fry's store.
It used be be filled this this sort of stuff.
Friday, August 18, 2023
Digital Audio Playback - 1987
Digital Audio playback from EPROM , older version for Sound Effects Car Horn
555 Timer, 2x 74LS373 Counters, and 74LS00 quad Nand , 74LS32 quad XOR
Sunday, August 13, 2023
Sun Micro Systems - Scott McNealy , First Global Internet Stream Decembe...
Scott McNealy's Historic First Live Video Stream - December 1992
Live from Palo Alto, California
Live from Palo Alto California it's sunny very nice day here we're trying a big new experiment I really hope this works could be very embarrassing we actually have press here checking this out to see what we're doing now we're doing a big experiment here using Sun technology.
If this works what we'd like you to do is email back to the address that you're going to see at the end of this thing saying that you saw it and you can help us out with this experiment.
We're going live to thousands of sun workstations around the Sun Network around the world some of you don't have enough bandwidth but we're getting to We Believe about 90 percent hopefully of the sun sites around the world.
I'd like to first off say good morning to everybody on the west coast, I'd like to say good afternoon to everybody in the east, and I'd like to say good evening to everybody in Europe who's watching and a special greeting to all of you out there in Japan who stayed up all night just to watch this five minutes experiment.
The Technology
Now some of you are familiar with the pre-recorded video capabilities of the workstation and we've made some trade-offs here. We've gone to a smaller screen to allow you to go live as opposed to pre-recorded with better video and a larger environment so that you get the intimacy and the embarrassment of watching me live.
Now it is live it's not a trick. I know some of you think we may be doing something magical well I brought proof.
[Holds up newspaper]
What we have here is today's San Jose Mercury News probably can't see it but this is actually today's date and we have IBM to announce cuts today in Workforce manufacturing. IBM today announced 25,000 more layoffs they announced a six billion dollar write-off and their stock is trading at an all-time low today on the New York Stock Exchange. That's proof that this is live and that this is this morning.
So for those of you who aren't on a color workstation I also want to show off my bright green sweater... relax those of you who have color workstations I'm just kidding it's actually a red sweater. I figured I'd wear red given the holiday season.
Why This Matters
Now this technology is really important why? Because Macs and PCs can't do this. Eat Your Heart Out Bill Gates.
This communication and the power that it brings to the marketplace will help us sell computers and will help make us a more productive computer company.
Thank You
Now my real main purpose here is to say thank you.
You've all worked incredibly hard you really kicked butt in 1992 and we did that in the face of the toughest economy I have seen in the 11 years I've been at Sun Microsystems.
You all are very talented very focused and very reliable but most importantly you all worked very very hard in the last 12 months. I appreciate it the management team appreciates it and mostly the people who all have jobs here at Sun Microsystems appreciate the efforts that each and every one of you have made to make Sun such a successful and exciting place to work.
We've gained market share we've gained momentum we have just done a fabulous job in 1992.
Looking Ahead to 1993
We worked hard but we're going to have an even more exciting and more successful 1993:
Model 41s are now shipping they're going out the door and we're going to have a very very good
MicroSPARC SuperSPARC kind of 1993Solaris 2.1 went out on plan this month and is shipping and we have the hottest operating
environment 32-bit operating environment in the worldMicrosoft had better watch out with NT we're coming after them big time and bookings
are rolling in
Salesforce has just been doing a great job we're off to a really great start on decade number two.
Holiday Wishes
Finally I'd like to wish you all the best for a great holiday season I hope it's the best ever that you've ever had. Thanks to your family to your friends to all the loved ones who helped support you during the very exciting and challenging year that 1992 was.
Enjoy the holidays be safe relax.
I'd like to say a special thanks to all of those of you in sales and operations and operation support who are going to help finish out the quarter here for us that's very important. I'd like to thank you for spending time during the holiday seasons to go do that.
Go charge your batteries come back in 1993 well rested we're going to go out and kick butt and have some major league fun next year.
Thanks gang ho ho ho!
This historic broadcast marked one of the first corporate live video streams, demonstrating Sun Microsystems' technological capabilities to employees worldwide.
Monday, April 10, 2023
The Questor Tapes : Story by: Gene Roddenberry
Project Questor is the brainchild of the genius Dr. Vaslovik, who
developed plans to build an android super-human. Although he has
disappeared and half of the programming tape was erased in the attempt
to decode it, his former colleagues continue the project and finally
succeed in creating Questor. However, Vaslovik seems to have installed a
secret program in Questor's brain. He flees and starts to search for
Vaslovik. Since half of his knowledge is missing, he needs the help of
Jerry Robinson, who is now suspected of having stolen the android.
Monday, May 02, 2022
History Darpa - Arpanet Internet Timeline
History Darpa
- Arpanet
Internet
Timeline
1957 USSR launches Sputnik, first artificial earth
satellite. In response,
US forms the
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the
Department of
Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and
technology
applicable to the military
1962 Paul Baran, RAND: "On Distributed
Communications Networks"
- Packet-switching networks; no single
outage point
1966 the Information Processing Techniques Office
(IPTO) of ARPA
appointed
Larry Roberts to develop the packet-switching wide-area
computer
network;
1967 ACM Symposium on Operating Principles
- Plan
presented for a packet-switching network
1968 Network presentation to the Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA)
1969 ARPANET commissioned by DOD for research
into networking
- use of
Information Message Processors (IMP) [Honeywell mini computer
with 12K
of memory] developed by Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN)
a
four-node initial configuration of the ARPANET was in place. 50Kbps
UCLA, SRI,
UCSB, U of Utah,
First
Request for Comment (RFC): "Host Software" by Steve Crocker
1970 ALOHAnet packet radio network developed by
Norman Abrahamson, U of
Hawaii
ARPANET
hosts start using Network Control Protocol (NCP).
1971 15 nodes (23 hosts): UCLA, SRI, UCSB, U of
Utah, BBN, MIT, RAND, SDC,
Harvard,
Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UIU(C), CWRU, CMU, NASA/Ames
1972 International Conference on Computer
Communications with
demonstration of ARPANET between 40 machines organized by Bob Kahn.
InterNetworking Working Group (INWG) created to address need
for
establishing agreed upon protocols.
Chairman: Vinton Cerf.
Ray
Tomlinson of BBN invents E-Mail program to send messages across a
distributed
network.
1973 First international connections to the
ARPANET: England and Norway
Bob
Metcalfe's (founder of 3COM) PhD Thesis outlines idea for Ethernet
1974 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A
Protocol for Packet Network
Internetworking" which specified in detail the design of a
Transmission Control Program (TCP).
BBN opens
Telenet, commercial version of ARPANET
(used
mostly to connect to Compuserve)
1975 Operational management of Internet
transferred to DCA (now DISA)
"Jargon
File", by Raphael Finkel at SAIL, first released tested
1976 UUCP
(Unix-to-Unix CoPy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed
with UNIX
one year later.
1977 THEORYNET created at U of Wisconsin
providing electronic mail to
over 100
researchers in computer science (using uucp).
TCP over world
wide satellite links and packet radio.
1978 Final draft of TCP released
1979 Meeting between U of Wisconsin, DARPA, NSF,
and computer scientists
from many
universities to establish a Computer Science Department
research
computer network.
USENET
established using uucp between Duke and UNC by Tom Truscott
and Steve
Bellovin. Providing News and E-Mail services
1980 Berkeley
releases 4.0 BSD UNIX
1981 BITNET, the "Because Its Time
NETwork"
- Started as
a cooperative network at the City University of New York.
- Provides
electronic mail and listserv servers to distribute
information.
- Unlike
USENET, where client s/w is needed, electronic mail is the
only tool
necessary.
CSNET
(Computer Science NETwork) built by UCAR and BBN through seed
money
granted by NSF to provide networking services (specially
E-Mail) to
university scientists with no access to ARPANET. CSNET
later becomes known as the Computer and
Science Network.
Minitel
(Teletel) is deployed across France by French Telecom.
1982 INWG establishes the Transmission Control
Protocol (TCP) and Internet
Protocol
(IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, for
ARPANET.
- This leads
to one of the first definition of an "internet"
as a
connected set of networks, specifically those using TCP/IP,
and
"Internet" as connected TCP/IP internets.
- DoD
declares TCP/IP suite to be standard for DoD
EUnet
(European UNIX Network) is created by EUUG to provide E-Mail and
USENET
services.
1983 Name
server developed at U of Wisconsin, no longer requiring users
to know the
exact path to other systems.
Cutover from
NCP to TCP/IP (1 January)
CSNET /
ARPANET gateway put in place
ARPANET
split into ARPANET and MILNET; the latter became integrated
with the
Defense Data Network created the previous year.
Berkeley releases 4.2 BSD UNIX
incorporating TCP/IP standard.
Desktop
workstations come into being, many with Berkeley UNIX which
includes IP
networking software.
Need
switches from having a single, large time sharing computer
connected to
Internet per site, to connection of an entire LAN.
EARN
(European Academic and Research Network) established. Very
similar to
the way BITNET works.
FidoNet
developed by Tom Jennings.
1984 Domain Name Server (DNS) introduced.
# of hosts
breaks 1,000
JUNET (Japan
Unix Network) established using UUCP.
JANET (Joint
Academic Network) established in the UK using the
Coloured
Book protocols.
1986 NSFNET created (backbone speed of 56Kbps)
- NSF
establishes 5 super-computing centers to provide high-computing
power for
all (JVNC@Princeton, PSC@Pittsburgh, SDSC@UCSD, NCSA@UIUC,
Theory
Center@Cornell).
ARPANET
bureaucracy keeps it from being used to interconnect
centers
and NSFNET comes into being with the aid of NASA and DOE.
- This
allows an explosion of connections, especially from
universities.
Cleveland
Freenet (start of NPTN) comes on-line
Network News
Transfer Protocol (NNTP) designed to enhance Usenet news
performance
over TCP/IP.
Mail
Exchanger (MX) records developed by Craig Partridge allowing
non-IP
network hosts to have domain addresses.
1987 NSF signs a cooperative agreement to manage
the NSFNET backbone with
Merit
Network, Inc. (IBM and MCI involvement was through an agreement
with
Merit). Merit, IBM, and MCI later
founded ANS.
UUNET is
founded with Usenix funds to provide commercial UUCP and
Usenet
access.
1000th RFC:
"Request For Comments reference guide"
# of hosts
breaks 10,000
# of BITNET
hosts breaks 1,000
1988 Robert Morris’s Internet worm burrows
through the Net breaking into and
crashing SUN
and VAX UNIX machines world wide.
1989 ARPANET formally expired - many rumors that
Internet will die.
# of hosts
breaks 100,000
NSFNET
backbone upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps)
RIPE
(Reseaux IP Europeens) formed (by European service providers) to
ensure the
necessary administrative and technical coordination to
allow the
operation of the pan-European IP Network
First relay
between a commercial electronic mail carrier (Compurserve)
and the
Internet through Ohio State University
World-Wide Web network developed by Tim
Berners-LEE at CERN in Europe.
1990
Second relay
between a commercial electronic mail carrier (MCI Mail)
and the Internet through the Corporation
for the National Research
Initiative
(CNRI)
EFF -
Electronic Frontier Foundation is founded by Mitch Kapor
Hytelnet
released by Peter Scott (U of Saskatchewan)
1991 Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX)
Association, Inc. formed by General
Atomics
(CERFnet), Performance Systems International, Inc. (PSInet),
and UUNET
Technologies, Inc. (AlterNet)
WAIS
released by Thinking Machines Corporation
Gopher
released by University of Minnesota
US High
Performance Computing Act (Gore 1) establishes the National
Research and
Education Network (NREN)
1992 Internet Society is chartered
World-Wide Web (WWW) released by CERN
# of hosts
breaks 1,000,000
NSFNET
backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps)
First MBONE
audio multicast (March) and video multicast (November)
1993 InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific
Internet services
- directory
and database services (AT&T)
-
registration services (Network Solutions Inc.)
-
information services (General Atomics/CERFnet)
US White
House comes on-line:
-
President Bill Clinton: president@whitehouse.gov
- Vice-President Al Gore:
vice-president@whitehouse.gov
Internet
Talk Radio begins broadcasting
United
Nations and World Bank come on-line
US National
Information Infrastructure Act
Mosaic takes the Internet by storm; WWW proliferates at a 341,634%
annual
growth rate of service traffic. Gopher's
growth is 997%.
1994 Communities begin to be wired up directly
to the Internet
US Senate
and House provide information servers
Mass
marketing finds its way to the Internet with mass e-mailings
Worms of a
new kind find their way around the Net - WWW Worms (W4),
joined by
Spiders, Wanderers, Crawlers, and Snakes ...
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